Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were journals but mostly scrapbooks of ideas, things observed, and things to remember. By the 1600s, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students in such institutions as Oxford. Beautiful blank books are still available for this purpose but the internet is so much more interesting as the content is shared.

05/04/2012

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A meaningful sentence depicts a possible state of affairs in the world; a meaningful and true sentence depicts an actual state of affairs in the world; anything in language that does not depict a possible state of affairs - that is, anything that does not depict possible fact - is, strictly speaking, meaningless.

Wittgenstein draws from the picture theory of meaning some arresting philosophical conclusions. The Tractatus regards as nonsensical, as literally meaningless, any claim that cannot be reduced to discrete facts about things in the world - for instance, any statements about ethics or aesthetics ("goodness" and "beauty" don't refer to actual things or properties).

"An economy depends fundamentally on public morality; some shared standards about what sorts of activities are impermissible because they so fundamentally violate trust that they threaten to undermine the social fabric. Without trust it has to depend upon such complex contracts and such weighty enforcement systems that it would crumble under its own weight. What we’ve seen over the last two decades in the United States is a steady decline in the willingness of people in leading positions in the private sector - on Wall Street and in large corporations especially - to maintain those minimum standards. The new rule has become making the highest profits possible regardless of the social consequences."